Jawbone reveals how much radiation Hiroshima atomic bomb victims absorbed
With the help of two Japanese scientists in Hiroshima, Brazilian physicist Sérgio Mascarenhas obtained several samples of victims’ bones, including a jawbone that belonged to a person who was less than a mile away from ground zero
At 8:15am on August 6, 1945, the United States dropped the first combat atomic bomb, “Little Boy”.
It exploded 43 seconds later, creating a massive fireball that incinerated much of Hiroshima.
Nearly 350,000 people were in the Japanese city that day, and most were civilians.
Twenty-seven years later, a scientist from across the Pacific Ocean arrived in Hiroshima with what was considered then a novel idea.
Brazilian physicist Sérgio Mascarenhas, at the time a visiting professor at Harvard University, said that exposure to radiation makes human bone magnetic, and that “magnetic memory” existed in the bones of atomic bombing victims years after the explosion.
Scientists could measure radiation exposure by examining the bones of victims, Mascarenhas proposed.